Sometimes you actually want an array, not a pseudo array. This is especially true when you aren't dealing with attributes (i.e., you just want the array of child nodes).

Do like this:

<?php
$children = $sxml->xpath('child::node()');
?>

The reason you might want this is to be able to use array functions like array_shift, array_pop, etc. This is especially true when you are writing recursive functions. Simplexml works really well in iterative programming, but if you try to implement recursion it gets ugly.

The example below shows the basic use of depth-first recursion to span the xml tree.

This is coded for the command line, and it prints out the original sentance above and then the copy cat sentence it creates itself for comparison, which as you will see; this example is slightly off from, I'll leave it upto you to resolve this issue.

All in all I personaly think xml and recursion go hand in hand, so if you don't understand recursion but know xml and want to use php to manipulate xml you will need to learn about recursion at some point.

Just a warning that the iterable returned from children() contains the '@attributes' key, which is "invisible" during a foreach but can be seen if using a different construct, such as list()=each() or casting to an array before iterating w/ foreach.